Queen Camilla has accepted an invitation to become Royal Patron of a museum and educational centre at the location where the Brontë sisters were born.The Queen officially opened The Brontë Birthplace in Thornton, Bradford, in May 2025 after it was opened to the public for the first time in its 200-year history following a fundraising campaign.Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, as well as brother Branwell, were all born in the house on Market Street, now under public ownership, between 1816 and 1820.Cathy Boyden, chair of the Brontë Birthplace, said: "Her Majesty's patronage is a wonderful endorsement of what has been achieved so far and gives us great encouragement as we look to the future."Boyden added: "Our first year has been a remarkable journey, made possible by the dedication of volunteers, supporters, members, funders and visitors who believed in the vision of bringing this historic building back to life."A spokesperson for the museum, which also offers overnight stays, said since it had opened, it had welcomed "thousands of visitors from across the UK and around the world".The siblings later went on to write poetry and novels, with the women originally writing under pen names.Some of their most famous works include Emily's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.The Brontë Parsonage Museum, based in the house where the sisters grew up after the family moved to Haworth in 1821, is also now a museum.According to a spokesperson for the Royal Family, having a Royal Patron "provides vital publicity for the work of these organisations, and allows their enormous achievements and contributions to society to be recognised and promoted".
In 2021, Sotheby’s in London announced the sale of a precious literary manuscript, feared lost for so long that it had acquired near-legendary status. A notebook into which Emily Brontë copied 31 of her poems had remained where it was last heard of in the 1930s, within the private literary collection formed by a 19th-century Lancashire industrialist, William Law of Honresfield House.As well as containing the only-known manuscript versions of some of Brontë’s most famous lyrics, the notebook bears pencilled annotations made by her elder sister (and posthumous editor) Charlotte, who, when later recalling the fiercely independent, contrarian will behind Brontë’s reserved outward manner, claimed that “an interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world”.Many biographers have welcomed the challenge of standing as “interpreter” to Emily Brontë, but all have had to confront the slight extent of her literary remains. No manuscript or draft material of her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is known to survive. Only a few of her letters and essays have been preserved, while all that is left of her long-running collaboration with her younger sister Anne on the chronicles of their imaginary empire of Gondal are her poems voiced by its impassioned, amoral protagonists.But the American literary scholar Deborah Lutz’s new biography has benefited from the successful fundraising campaign to purchase the “Honresfield Library” for the British nation – including the rediscovered poetry notebook, now preserved in the British Library. Lutz’s insights from accessing this original document, and her expert critical reappraisals of the poems, are among the highlights of this fresh and engaging account of Brontë’s career.The title of This Dark Night, taken from Brontë’s poem opening “The wind I hear it sighing”, announces Lutz’s focus on Brontë as a poet of nocturnal reveries and affinity with nature, who also achieved a sensational innovation in prose with Wuthering Heights, combining a Gothic atmosphere of romance and supernaturalism with grim, confrontational realism in the depiction of madness and violence.While fully honouring Brontë’s genius, Lutz re-examines her domestic and working life with the same human sympathy, and attention to the materiality of 19th-century writing and publication practices, previously displayed in her group biography of the Brontë sisters, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015).All the familiar anecdotes are here, with Brontë again seen abandoning teaching opportunities for managing her clergyman father’s household; studying German while baking bread; cauterising her own wound from a dog bite; rescuing her laudanum-addicted brother Branwell after he set fire to his bed, and stoically enduring, aged 30, her own consumptive death agony in 1848.But the standard narrative gains texture from both first-hand and closely researched engagements with the natural phenomena Brontë experienced, in keeping with Lutz’s quotation of Gertrude Stein’s assertion that “anybody is as their land and air is”.A discussion of Brontë’s poetry and artwork inspired by her captive merlin falcon is enlivened by her father’s description of handling a merlin, jotted into his copy of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (another Honresfield treasure).The Brontë family vault in St Michael and All Angels, Haworth, with its frequently necessitated reopenings, becomes a powerful motif in Lutz’s explorations of how Brontë’s preoccupations with mortality and decay grew out of her awareness of the Haworth gravediggers’ activities, and of the corpse-preserving properties of the peat bogs on the Yorkshire moors.Lutz’s project of reconstructing Brontë’s lived experience succeeds best when grounded in direct personal observations of place, or in close readings of extant literary manuscripts and other written records. Less convincing are some speculative commentaries on topics including Brontë’s sexuality, and her process of composing Wuthering Heights, where evidence is sometimes lacking even for conjecture (whether by Lutz, or by earlier scholars whose work she cites).At the same time, important contexts with relevance to Brontë’s geographical and social influences are left unexplored. Considerations of what her father’s Irish heritage might have meant to her, or of how the Romantic-period Methodist movement influenced both her parents’ Anglicanism, and her own unorthodox religious and aesthetic sensibilities, are in particular only fleetingly touched upon.In assessing Brontë’s personality, Lutz wisely avoids any anachronistic, pathologising labelling of her characteristics and behaviours. She also holds back, however, from sustained engagement with the personal, post-Romantic philosophy of individualism that drove Brontë’s struggle for authentic self-determination (and which anticipated aspects of 20th-century existentialism).Ultimately, in This Dark Night, Brontë the woman again resists definition, remaining in somewhat indistinct focus amid an accumulation of social-historical detail. Nevertheless, in her vivid communication of her physical encounters with Brontë’s art and craft in the archives, and her sensitive new readings of familiar texts, Lutz achieves a worthy celebration of the unique, uncompromising author who proclaimed “No coward soul is mine”, and became the creator of Heathcliff. (Jenny McAuley)
Christie’s June 30 Exceptional Sale in London offers many fine lots, among them, a bespoke cigar humidor of Cuban amboya gifted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill during the war ($25,000-$40,000); a sabre-toothed tiger skull discovered in a Pleistoscene sinkhole in Florida in 2008 ($1,000,000-$1,500,000); and by no means least, a rare first edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published, fascinatingly, as a three-volume set, the first two of which are devoted to that novel, the third of which is her sister Anne’s novel, Agnes Grey. Pictured top, a portrait of the author of Wuthering Heights at about twenty-five, painted by her brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë.The three volume set carries carry a pre-sale estimate range of £400,000-£600,000 ($529,600-$794,220), but for a host of reasons, as the hammer strikes Christie’s lectern sometime after 4:30 British Summer Time (11:30 Eastern) on June 30, the effervescent speculation in the press is that this particular first edition will run higher than that. Some of the more breathless estimates bandied about in the last weeks range up into seven figures.Whatever number the hammer price attains, the intensity of interest that this lot generates is deep and longstanding. Working from the inside of these volumes out to their remarkably well-preserved cloth bindings – more on which, below – the first, main element of value is that it’s Emily Brontë’s enduring and revolutionary literary masterpiece at issue.The significance of her achievement within English and global literature is difficult to overstate. Of the three sisters, Sister Emily’s exquisitely modern gift to literature and to us – via her characters Catherine and Heathcliff and the Earnshaw and Linton families – was to show that we are all conflicted, riven, subject to great swings of emotion and roundly challenged by simply living out our lives in a largely stormy world, whatever quotient of that may be of our own manufacture.Emily Brontë’s telling of this narrative premise was, also, far ahead of its time, unadorned, stripped bare, always in immediate reach of the brutal facts of her characters’ relations and complications with each other. The very dialogue she gives them cuts to the point of those many conflicts – it’s all fire and motion, there’s virtually no digressive froth to the narrative. Neither Emily Brontë nor her famous characters waste a minute outside their conflicts. They lived them. (Guy Martin)
Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Robert Fuest, 1970)Wuthering Heights has gone through many cinematic adaptations, none of which have fully captured the essence of the novel, but the 1970 version directed by Robert Fuest is by far the most dull. It’s a major issue when a film based on one of the subversive, heartbreaking psychological romantic dramas of all time is given a G-rating, as Furst’s Wuthering Heights is afraid to have any edge.By sanding off the film from anything deeper, Timothy Dalton’s Heathcliff seems to be just a tragic figure and a failed romantic lead, and not the abusive, cruel character that emerges in the novel. Wuthering Heights is a complex story of race, class, status, and social hierarchies, and to remove the obsessive emotions from Heathcliff’s fixation on Catherine Earnshaw completely misses the point of what Emily Brontë was trying to say with her only novel. (Liam Gaughan)
There is a long tradition of romantic heroes who are difficult, cold, or cruel—Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, half a century of brooding figures on book covers with artfully unbuttoned shirts—and most of them do not change at all. Rochester is reshaped by circumstance; Heathcliff is consumed by it. What separates Darcy from the parade that followed him is that his arc is genuinely moral, not merely emotional. He is not softened by love. He is corrected by it, and he chooses to be.
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by Marian YeeLittle A (Amazon Publishing)ISBN: 978-1662537912June 2026Through time, space, and the transcendence of maternal love, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is reimagined in the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection, and a place to belong.Jane Eyre is a missionary’s wife.A bookseller in Vietnam.A time traveler.A hero in a modern gothic tale.What if Jane’s story didn’t end with her marriage to Edward Rochester? What if she never married him at all?In one lifetime, Jane travels to India and Burma as Mrs. St. John Rivers. In another, she’s Trang, a young woman selling books in Vietnam, vying for the love of the local priest. Yet another picks up where Brontë left her, now grieving the loss of her child and crossing time and space to find him. And finally, a young Vietnamese-American man searching for himself in Boston, a tutor whose relationship with a veteran feels strangely, achingly familiar…Each thread tells Jane’s story in sweeping, heartbreaking shades of loss, vulnerability, yearning, and the fierce love of mother and child that withstands time and space. While she may long for something more out of a life she didn’t get to choose, she can still decide what to make of it.
Ministers have announced a £47m funding boost for projects aimed at protecting some of peatlands, which are vital for absorbing and storing planet-heating carbon from the atmosphere.The money, announced by the Environment Department (Defra) today, will be divided between three pots, each supporting projects related to either building wetting infrastructure, growing wetland crops and bulrush, or receiving peatland restoration training.Farmers, land managers, drainage boards, water companies and environmental organisations can apply for grants from these different schemes depending on which action suits them best.Peatlands store more than half of the carbon found in England’s land-based ecosystems.This makes them a powerful nature-based solution against climate change, which is mostly driven by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.However, 80 per cent of England’s peatlands have been degraded after centuries of drainage to make way for farming caused the soils to dry out and the organic matter they contain to decompose, releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere. [...]Defra’s announcement comes amid plans to build a huge wind farm on Walshaw Moor, in Calderdale, the wild landscape that inspired Wuthering Heights.Despite its legal protections, Saudi-backed developers are pushing ahead with plans to build 34 wind turbines – at 200m more than 40m higher than the Blackpool Tower – and a battery energy storage system.MPs from Labour and the Conservatives have objected to the project, highlighting the fact that the scheme would cover more than 2,300 hectares of protected peatland. (Ralph Blackburn)
Wednesday, July 1 • 2 AM - 5 AM CEST / 5pm PST / 8pm ESTJoin us online for a conversation with Deborah Lutz on her new biography of Emily Brontë, This Dark Night. Deborah will be in conversation with Womb House Books founder, Jessica Ferri.Sustaining members of Womb House Books receive free admission to all author events, 15% off online and in shop, and more. Consider becoming a member today.Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her - most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Deborah reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to one of the greatest and fiercest writers we have, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art.This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister).Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination.
The final twist reveals that the true source of terror is not ghosts, but Marta Carver, a disturbed woman who has been secretly living within the house. This shift from supernatural horror to human menace, similar to renowned gothic stories like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, makes the story more unsettling and grounded.
Best restorationParnham Park, Dorset(...) Just ten minutes from the Jurassic Coast, the gardens at Parnham are being thoughtfully brought back to life as part of a dramatic restoration of both house and grounds. The house was devastated by a fire several years ago, lending the estate a romantic, distinctly Jane Eyre feel as it slowly returns to glory. (Helen Daly)
8. A young woman falls for the wealthy, mysterious man whose dark secrets threaten their future together. (Joanne Finney)
Don’t expect high fidelity to Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel about lovers brooding on the 19th-century English moors. Only the novel’s first half is covered here with Margot Robbie as the ill-fated Cathy and Jacob Elordi as her paramour Heathcliff. The bold costumes and sets make up for storytelling liberties. Streaming now, HBO Max (Michael Fell)
Bayern 2 Salon – Buchgefühl: Emily Brontë, Sturmhöhe (Saturday 27 June 2026, 14:05–15:00 CET; also available as podcast via ARD Sounds). In this episode of Bayern 2's literary reading-and-conversation format, host Judith Heitkamp talks with prize-winning Dutch author Anjet Daanje — whose novel Das Lied von Storch und Dromedar (recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize) imagines the afterlife of Emily Brontë through literature — about why Wuthering Heights has fascinated her since childhood. Daanje argues that film adaptations almost always cover only the first half of the novel, losing something essential: Brontë's portrait of how the next generation survives after the parental one has burned itself out. She also reflects on Brontë's elusiveness as a biographical subject ("you learn more about the biographers than about Emily Brontë herself"). Readings are performed by Irina Wanka, the German voice of Sophie Marceau. In German.
Edited by Elizabeth DearnleyBritish Library PublishingBritish Library Tales of the WeirdISBN: 9780712369459June 2026Authors: Emily Brontë, Andrew Michael Hurley, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, Ted Hughes, Arthur Machen, Sabine Baring-Gould, Gertrude Atherton, L.T.C. Rolt, E. F. Benson, Phyllis Bentley, Lettice Galbraith, Michael Temple, F. W. Moorman.The stars gave light enough for me to discern the figure as that of a man, but I could scarcely discover more. “Dark night, this,” I said. “Darker below,” he muttered, as though to himself; “darker, darker, darker.”Yorkshire: a land entwined with a distinctive tradition of uncanny literature and folklore, home to twilit towns thronging with restless ghosts, woods alive with the whispers of fairies and vast moorlands stalked by boggarts and barghests after dark.Exploring Yorkshire’s position as a heartland of British supernatural fiction, the stories and poems gathered here trace its weird literary heritage from medieval tales of shapeshifting spirits to the Gothic worlds of the Brontë sisters, and from wartime hauntings to modern folk horror. Including local legends from rare sources and unsettling stories from Arthur Machen, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Andrew Michael Hurley and many more, this collection offers glimpses of a stranger England hidden among the shadows of the dales.
Through time, space, and the transcendence of maternal love, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is reimagined in the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection, and a place to belong.Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from 4 Janes by Marian Yee, which releases on June 30th 2026.Jane Eyre is a missionary’s wife.A bookseller in Vietnam.A time traveler.A hero in a modern gothic tale.What if Jane’s story didn’t end with her marriage to Edward Rochester? What if she never married him at all?In one lifetime, Jane travels to India and Burma as Mrs. St. John Rivers. In another, she’s Trang, a young woman selling books in Vietnam, vying for the love of the local priest. Yet another picks up where Brontë left her, now grieving the loss of her child and crossing time and space to find him. And finally, a young Vietnamese-American man searching for himself in Boston, a tutor whose relationship with a veteran feels strangely, achingly familiar…Each thread tells Jane’s story in sweeping, heartbreaking shades of loss, vulnerability, yearning, and the fierce love of mother and child that withstands time and space. While she may long for something more out of a life she didn’t get to choose, she can still decide what to make of it. (Elise Dumpleton)Chapter OneMarseilles, France, 1851Jane Eyre is dead.The plain gold band on my finger is the sign of her demise.I am Jane Rivers now. Or, more accurately, Mrs. St. John Rivers.Mrs. St. John Rivers. I try on the name like a pair of new calfskin gloves. The syllables glide along my tongue smoothly enough once I get over the little bump at the beginning. Then I study the small hands lying calmly in my lap. They are encased in soft, pale-yellow leather, and like my new name, they seem to belong to somebody else.I have been a missionary’s wife for barely a week.I wait at one of the fashionable coffeehouses on La Canebière, surrounded by wonders: gilding, mirrors, paintings, tapestries, and a large revolving clock in the center that gives the time on three continents. They bring together the charms of this port city as if in miniature. I look about, my senses heightened: The drink served here is not to my liking, but I savor its rich, smoky aroma.For these moments at least, I sit alone. St. John is at the purser’s office, seeing to our cabins and passage. We arrived at this bustling French port last night, and were deposited, along with the English mail that had departed on the London train with us, in a damp heap along the quay. This followed a Channel crossing that was in itself a trial. I spent most of that time huffing short, shallow breaths and moaning miserably into my handkerchief while my stomach roiled. St. John held my hand dutifully while I battled nausea, but I could not entirely dismiss a sense that his patience was forced, that he hid his disapprobation at finding me such a poor traveler before we had even ventured beyond Europe.No matter. Now all is near ready. We have said our goodbyes. I wait with our few belongings, only the baggage we will need on the crossing, hardly enough for a journey of nearly two months. Fortunately, our present needs are few, and the rest of our trunks will be sent along. In our haste to depart we left them to Diana and Mary—his sisters, my cousins—to assemble, to cord, to nail the cards that would direct them to our final destination. They will chase us from port to port until we are reunited—only six weeks from now!—in India. At that point, we will open them with a sense of wonder that such luxuries and extravagances exist; we will puzzle what to do with calfskin gloves and fur muffs in the blazing heat of a sun-drowned continent.As I wait, I return to the book I laid aside and open it to the point where a folded sheet of paper divides the unread pages from the finished ones. The paper is nothing more, or less, than the very letter that started me off on this journey, having arrived for Mary two months ago from a friend in ⸺shire. As Mary shared its contents with Diana and me, one set of ears heard, with distant concern and casual curiosity, the misfortune of others that did not touch upon itself, while another set heard the end of the world.It was news of a devastating fire at Thornfield: The entire estate had been burned to the ground, and no one there had survived the destruction. No one. God forgive me, there was only one who mattered in that moment, only one whose death meant my own. I could barely bring myself to whisper his name. Edward. I recall Mary’s voice droning on, then pausing; Diana’s sharp oh dear. Was it for the news or at my fainting dead away? I was told afterward that I had collapsed in a wordless heap.I have no recollection of those hours, those days (five, they told me) immediately following, when I drifted in a haze of blankness. Feeling fled me; I was disembodied, perceiving only strange scraps. A slight stirring in the current of air let into the sickroom. Fragments of hushed speech floating in and out of range. Gradually, shadowy forms constellated into people coming in and going out, though one body remained the longest, hovering near my orbit like a constant moon. As the boundaries of my vision drew in, the blurred edges slowly sharpened into clear features: twin orbs of blue that floated, then settled upon a finely boned visage.“Jane.” The eyes probed my face. “You know me.”“Yes, St. John.”He heaved a sigh. “You have been gone a long time.”“I have been right here,” I said, bewildered. “In this bed. I have not moved.” Indeed, I felt stiff all over, for I had been practicing the pose of a corpse.“Stay,” he gently implored.“I am right here,” I repeated.“Nay, you were drifting again, Jane. To that place you have been these past five days, five years, it seemed. Sorrow’s shores. Come back to the living, Jane.”And then I remembered.
As a university literature professor, I often recommend Charlotte Brontë’s *Jane Eyre* to students who find classics daunting. It is relatively accessible among so-called classics and, above all, unexpectedly entertaining. However, Hélène, the protagonist of Fanny Britt’s graphic novel *Jane, the Fox, and Me* (illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, 2013), reads *Jane Eyre* for a different reason.Bullied at school, Hélène pulls out her book on the bus. *Jane Eyre* is her sole escape. At an age when emotions run raw, the wounds inflicted by classmates are sharp enough to drain the color from a teenager’s world—gray corridors, ashen faces. Arsenault renders Hélène’s world in drab black and white, while the scenes Hélène imagines from *Jane Eyre* bloom in cheerful pastel watercolors. Jane, an orphan, poor, and far from conventionally beautiful, never relinquishes her dignity. But Hélène is not Jane.The girl confesses to the reader: “I am a sausage. Jane Eyre may be an orphan, ugly, abused, lonely, and abandoned, but she was never a sausage. Never was, never will be—a fat sausage.” The pair of sausages drawn on facing book covers, though initially comical, evoke a grotesque imagery reminiscent of Kafka. This is, of course, a visual metaphor for Hélène’s alienation.The climax arrives when Hélène, at a nature camp, is approached by a fox. Its gaze is gentle. Untamed yet unafraid to meet her eyes, the beautiful creature seems to sense her loneliness without a word. Though the fox vanishes like a mirage, this brief encounter grants Hélène a crucial realization. As she acts on it, her world finally blossoms like spring flowers—and swiftly fills with vibrant hues. What exactly Hélène realizes is for readers to discover within the pages. (Shin Seung-han)
The wild Yorkshire moors of northern England feature prominently in the 19th-century novels “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre,” by Emily and Charlotte Brontë. The sisters spent most of their lives in the village of Haworth, where you can visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which includes their manuscripts and writing desks. To see the landscape that inspired their work, you can take a five-mile roundtrip across Haworth Moor to the Brontë Waterfall. (Jane Green)
The Brontë Sisters UK has a new full-length video on the Brontë diary papers — the scattered journal fragments left by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, covering everyday life at Haworth from the 1830s through the 1840s.
by Amelia BlackwellMacmillanISBN: 9781035054145June 2026Georgina Darcy travels through time to save the Brontës from a killer in The Haunting of a Brontë, a wildly amusing cosy crime adventure from Amelia Blackwell, author of A Crime Through Time.Pemberley, 1799.Like many a Regency heroine, Georgiana Darcy is pining for the man she loves. The difference being, her lover is in 1995, while she has been left behind in 1799 waiting for the mysterious device that transports her through time to re-activate.Thorp Green Hall, 1845.But when her Motorola pager finally comes back to life, Georgiana finds herself transported only forty-six years into the future to gloomy Thorp Green Hall, where Branwell and Anne Brontë are the tutor and governess.Georgiana assumes she will soon come across a murder to investigate, but even before she discovers the cook’s father dead on a chopping block, she finds herself entangled in a web of passion, deception, and danger centred on the eccentric Branwell Brontë.Branwell is engaged in a perilous affair with the mistress of the house and experiences a series of sinister omens and terrifying encounters. As Georgiana uncovers the mysteries of Thorp Green Hall, and learns more about the origins of her time-travelling capabilities, she must find the killer and save the Brontë siblings from an evil plot to prevent a most terrible loss to readers everywhere . . .The second entertaining entry in the Miss Darcy Investigates series of timeslip mysteries. Start here, or go back to the beginning with A Crime Through Time.
It’s safe to say that we’ve been well and truly spoiled for choice this year when it comes to period dramas. Whether it’s Wuthering Heights, The Other Bennet Sister, The Forsytes or Little House On The Prairie, if you’re a fan of the genre, there are plenty of titles vying for a much-coveted spot on your watchlist. (Abby Allen)
This is no Wuthering Heights wild interpretation, but the film, directed by Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean), looks like it has more than a whiff of award season prestige – while also offering up a few surprises. (Tori Brazier)
Charli XCX, Wuthering HeightsCharli’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack sonically mirrors the film’s penchant for bodice-ripping bombast and grief while standing on its own. It’s often loud and discordant, filled with droning synths and screeching strings that underlie Charli’s digitally manipulated vocals. And yet, somehow the album manages to be as startling and satisfying as a clandestine carriage-house hook-up. Many of its highlights spring from the production styles crashing up against or bleeding into one another. The strings, arranged by Gareth Murphy, prove a welcome addition to Charli’s usual soundscape, bringing a wry grandeur to her hyper-pop instincts that anachronizes and cinematizes her music a la early Lana del Rey. In less than 90 seconds, the interlude “Open Up” nearly wordlessly evokes the fatalistic heartache forever embedded in the rock walls of Wuthering Heights—the kind of tragedy that feels both timeless and as pressing as ever. (Savio)
It started when she was working on the song “House,” for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, and remembered Cale saying, in a documentary, that he wanted to make his strings sound “both elegant and brutal.” Given that she’d had a similar goal for “House,” she suddenly had an idea. “I thought, Do you think I could reach out to John Cale?” she says to host Bella Freud. “I started asking the question out loud, not sure what the answer would have been.” She found a way to get into contact with him, and they set up a call.Unfortunately, on the day of the chat, she forgot it was happening. “The day that we were supposed to speak, I was having a really bad day,” Charli recalled. “I was my very unregulated self.” In the midst of crying with her husband, George Daniel, she got a call. “I picked up the phone, and there was this voice on the end that was gravelly and deep and Welsh,” she said. “I was like, ‘Who is this?’” It was John Cale. “I was like, Oh my God, John Cale is calling me mid-breakdown,” Charli remembered. “I told him, ‘I’m having a bad day, John, but speaking to you on the phone is making me feel so much better.’” Clearly, it worked out. (Jason P. Frank)
Even the classics are getting explicit. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026) wraps both Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in yearning, with BDSM scenes featuring one woman getting whipped in a horse bridle, another chained to the fireplace, crawling on all fours as a willing pet. None of this was in Emily Brontë’s book. Neither was the pink bedroom that we’re told it’s the exact colour of Cathy’s naked skin. (Kritika Kapoor)
Saturday, June 2714.00 h Wuthering Heights 19391939. 104 m. William Wyler. Park Circus. US. English. Rated NR.Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, David Niven, and Geraldine Fitzgerald star in William Wyler’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of Emily Bronte’s tale of passion, hatred, and revenge.Hailed as a “timeless masterpiece,” Wuthering Heights is the story of a tortured love affair between Heathcliff and Cathy, her escape by marriage to the wealthy Edgar and Heathcliff’s savage retaliation upon the woman he loves. Olivier portrays Heathcliff the jilted lover who bides his time before extracting his vicious vengeance; Oberon is Cathy, object of Heathcliff’s affections; Niven is Edgar, who steals Cathy from Heathcliff; and Fitzgerald is Isabella, Edgar’s sister who Heathcliff marries in an attempt to gain a measure of revenge.Wyler’s film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.Join us after the film for a Q&A with Professor Deborah Lutz, author of This Dark Night – Emily Brontë, A Life, the new acclaimed biography of Emily Brontë. Copies of the book will be on sale courtesy of The Village Bookstore.
When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, several critics used the word “strange.” As the New York Times’ B.D. McClay points out, one review simply began, “This is a strange book,” while others described the novel as “strangely original” and “a strange, inartistic story.”“Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it,” another observed. “We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before.”The novel’s first edition was divided into two volumes, released alongside a third volume containing Agnes Grey, a novel by Emily’s younger sister, Anne. Each one was covered with green-grey cloth, with arabesques and floral patterns decorating the cover. The siblings published under the pseudonyms Ellis and Acton Bell.Of the estimated 250 copies printed, only a few complete copies survive with their full-cloth binding intact. On June 30, Christie’s will sell the first edition’s three volumes in one lot at an auction in London, where the collection is expected to go for between $540,000 and $800,000.“The last time one appeared at auction was in 1908, so no collector alive has had a chance to acquire one,” Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, tells the Art Newspaper’s Maev Kennedy. “Private and public collectors all over the world will want this book.”When Emily and Anne saw the printed editions, they realized that the books contained a numbllings of “Agnes Grey” (“Anges Grey”) and three misspellings of “Heights” (“Heer of errors. Some pages were marked with the wrong numbers, while others contained incorrect or missing punctuation. Perhaps the most egregious mistakes were six misspeghts”).In letters written in the weeks after publication, their sister Charlotte complained that the volumes were full of “errors of the press” that she described as “mortifying.” Writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte had published her own debut novel, Jane Eyre, earlier the same year, and it had been an immediate success. She was deeply protective of her younger sisters, and she was disappointed that their publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, had allowed so many mistakes to make it to press. “If Mr. Newby always does business in this way,” she wrote, “few authors would like to have him for their publisher a second time.”Newby hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Jane Eyre, but Wuthering Heights, which explored darker themes, didn’t enjoy the same level of success. Readers were “shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance,” according to Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper. North American Review criticized the novel, writing that “Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.”Wuthering Heights follows Catherine Earnshaw, a young girl who lives with her family in northern England, and Heathcliff, an orphan who grows up alongside them. The pair forms an inextricable bond that breeds misery across two generations. The story is set against the dramatic, untamed moors of Yorkshire—which is also where the Brontë siblings grew up. [...]Emily didn’t live to see her novel become so beloved, admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf. “The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries,” Woolf wrote in 1925. “She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.” The novel has inspired art, music and film, in addition to literature.“It remains a work that artists return to again and again because of its emotional force, its atmosphere and its psychological intensity,” Wiltshire tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless.Few surviving first-edition copies still have their original binding. Wiltshire has only been able to track down five others: Three are in the university libraries of Leeds, Oxford and Princeton universities, according to a statement, while the fourth is housed at the British Library in London. The fifth, which contains Charlotte’s annotations, is missing several pages, and it sold for $86,500 in 2009. (Ellen Wexler)
largely inspired by the wild beauty and dramatic landscapes of Top Withens and the Yorkshire moors that the Brontës capture in their work. (Laura Reid)
Zhiying ZhangThe Explicator, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2026.2680014 (2026)Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) is a novel profoundly concerned with the act of looking and being looked at. Vision in the novel is never neutral; rather, it is bound up with power, desire, moral judgment, and gendered discipline. In particular, the ekphrastic episode of the Cleopatra painting in Chapter XIX has elicited substantial critical commentary and functions as a focal point for discussions of gender, spectatorship, Orientalism, aesthetics, and narrative authority. (...)
‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily BrontëWith more than 20 film and TV adaptations of Wuthering Heights, the classic story between Heathcliff and Catherine has been told in a number of ways—including a song by Nicks. While she was inspired to write “Wild Heart” after watching an adaptation of the story on the big screen, she’s been a fan of the books since her college days.“I first read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when I was in college in California in the late 1960s,” Nicks shared. “They are two of my favorite books because they’re just so brilliantly written. The beauty of both these classics is that they were fantastic when I was a teenager and they still appeal to me now as a 63-year-old woman.”While those classic novels left a lasting impression on Nicks, literature wasn’t her only creative influence. Film also played a major role in shaping her songwriting. In fact, the singer has shared that seeing Wuthering Heights inspired her to write the title track for her 1983 album, Wild Heart.“I’d written “Wild Heart” early on,” Nicks recalled. “I remember singing it during a Rolling Stone cover shoot for Bella Donna [which came out in 1981] and I wrote it completely and utterly about the movie Wuthering Heights. I wrote it about Heathcliff and Cathy, and the fact that they were one person, that they couldn’t be together and they couldn’t be separate, and about the power and the drama of the closing death bed scene… All those amazing things he says to her.” (Julianne MacNeill)
Tell us about Possession from your perspective …Tonally, it’s Modern Gothic. A woman travels to a remote location. A foreboding ‘house on the hill‘. She has this vague feeling that something terrible is about to happen (spoiler – it does). It’s the same set-up as Jane Eyre, Dracula, or The Woman in Black, but it centres around the experience of a woman of colour in the present day. (Tamika Mitchell)
Alia Rehman, Hira Javed and Iram AyazLiberal Journal of Language & Literature Review, Vol. 4 No. 1 (2026)The paper discusses a thematic and psychological analysis of the notions of love and revenge in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with particular attention to the figure of Heathcliff. It aims to study how intense frustrated love becomes transformed into destructive vengeance and the way such a vicious circle furthers violence, suffering, and ruination throughout generations. Qualitative research methodology is employed in this study because close textual reading and thematic analysis, as its tools, are necessary to trace causes, development, and consequences of revenge within the narrative. Analysis reveals that the vengeful behavior of Heathcliff originates from social alienation, class prejudice, childhood abuse, and emotional betrayal, mainly Catherine Earnshaw’s denigrating her emotional commitment for social status. The research further discusses an intriguing connection between obsessive love and revenge; it indicates how passion, when strangled by social mores, acts as a catalyst for cruelty and moral degeneration. Most importantly, this study suggests that Brontë had denounced revenge as a self-deprecating impulse, and how such a cycle of revenge is retarded in the second generation through mutual comprehension, forgiveness, and nourishing love. By placing revenge as the central thematic force of the novel, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of Wuthering Heights as a psychological and moral exploration of human passion, suffering, and the possibility of redemption.
The Newlands House Gallery in Petworth has collated works and personal artefacts to create a mesmerising exhibition, Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature, showing until 6th September. Paula Rego was one of the great printmakers and storytellers of our time and she took inspiration from a range of literary sources such as fairy tales, nursery rhymes, literary classics and folklore. This summer exhibition draws upon three of Paula’s major printmaking works: Nursery Rhymes, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre to illustrate her striking and unexpected portrayal of these well-known stories. Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature, 22nd May – 6th September
by Kit IfordRainbow GothicISBN-13 : 978-1919536934March 2026Romance for Boys is a 5 book series. Seven queer boys at a northern English university believe classic straight romance has nothing to do with modern queer love, so they form the Romance for Boys book club to pick apart Brontë, Shakespeare, du Maurier, Dickens and Austen, and end up in a dark‑academia, BL‑style tangle of intense first loves, aching unrequited crushes, messy love triangles and dangerous obsessions, slowly realising that the very stories they dismissed are shaping how they hurt each other, choose each other, and fight their way toward messy, hard‑won happy endings.Kit used to think great love stories were dangerous nonsense, until he found himself caught between two very different boys under the shadow of the Brontës. After a career-ending dance injury, he starts over at a northern university and falls into a world of moors, literature, and unexpected longing.Marcus is wild, intense, and impossible to ignore, the kind of hillwalker who drags Kit out onto the moors and into feelings he thought he had left behind. Gerald is careful, clever, and steady, offering warmth, safety, and the possibility of a future Kit never expected to want. As Kit and his friends study Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, their own lives begin to echo the Brontës’ worlds of desire, restraint, obsession, and self-respect.Book 1 is a queer campus coming-of-age romance with found family, hurt/comfort, disability and recovery, grumpy/sunshine tension, moorland gothic atmosphere, and lit-nerd drama for readers who love Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and intense slow burns that turn friendship into love.
This Dark Night by Deborah LutzIn her lyrical new biography, Lutz shines light on the most enigmatic of the literary, secluded Brontë sisters: Emily. She was described as introverted, odd, guarded to the point of taciturnity, and her “extreme reserve seemed impenetrable,” said her friend Ellen Nussey. “Except to go to church or take a walk on the hills,” wrote her sister Charlotte, “she rarely crossed the threshold of home.” Lutz writes that Emily was indeed a knotty character of “devilish ferocity,” but she was also informed, engaged, even cosmopolitan in her reading and outlook.
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Speaker: Emma Conally-BarklemTuesday 23rd June, 6:30pmOnline Talk via ZoomJoin us for a fascinating journey through space and time as Emma discusses the process of creating an imagined world from one of the few details known about Emily Brontë. It is believed she rescued then kept a Merlin Hawk who she called Nero. Her bird of prey soars through history and the West Yorkshire landscape both quarry and predator. Conally-Barklem explores what it means to be captive and to be wild, the condition of the falconer, its lore and mystery through the enigmatic Brontë sister who stands both inside and outside of time.
Bella Swan lee 'Cumbres borrascosas', de Emily BrontëLa tímida e introvertida Bella Swan, protagonista de la saga Crepúsculo, fue vista leyendo 'Cumbres borrascosas'. La novela de Emily Brontë es un clásico de la literatura romántica, pero también una historia intensa, oscura y marcada por relaciones emocionales extremas. Justo lo que a ella le va a ocurrir en determinado momento con Edward.Bella no es una protagonista convencional: es introspectiva, emocional y profundamente entregada. Su conexión con 'Cumbres Borrascosas' refleja su tendencia a idealizar el amor absoluto, incluso cuando este implica sufrimiento o sacrificio. Al igual que Catherine, Bella está dispuesta a todo por ese vínculo que considera irrompible.'Jane Eyre', de Charlotte BrontëRachel Green lee 'Jane Eyre', de Charlotte BrontëLa novela de Charlotte Brontë es un relato de independencia femenina. Jane es una mujer que lucha por construir su propia identidad, tomar decisiones por sí misma y no depender de las expectativas sociales o de los hombres que la rodean.Esto tiene un claro paralelismo con Rachel. Al inicio de la serie, depende completamente de su entorno -especialmente en lo económico y emocional-, pero poco a poco construye una carrera, toma decisiones propias y redefine quién quiere ser. (Melissa González) (Translation)
There’s Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, who flees her husband to protect their son from his drunken ways; (Harley Freeman)
On Thursday, July 9, the focus shifts to The Bookery, with Amelia Blackwell bringing a lively blend of literary history and mystery with The Haunting of a Brontë. In conversation with Devon crime writer Stephanie Austin, this promises an engaging evening of humour, intrigue and gothic atmosphere, inspired by the enduring fascination of the Brontë sisters.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëLiterary observers have often connected Swift's song Mad Woman to themes found in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The song's exploration of female anger, perception, and social judgment echoes ideas that appear throughout the classic novel. The connection becomes particularly striking through the character of Bertha Mason, the woman hidden away in Mr. Rochester's attic, whose story has long been discussed as a symbol of female suppression and misunderstood rage.
Wuthering Heights is, possibly, a good movie. To some, I believe it can be an enjoyable movie. It was not for me. Still, the costuming is avant-garde and fun, the cinematography is breathtaking, and the performances are captivating—none of these things can be taken away from the film because some bits made the audience squirm. However, Wuthering Heights, as directed by Emerald Fennell, fails to be an effective adaptation.Before much promotion was released about the film, it drew considerable controversy when Jacob Elordi was cast as Heathcliff, a main character. This drew significant criticism, largely from those familiar with the original book, as Heathcliff is a person of color in Brontë’s book. No character ever says, point blank, “Heathcliff, I hate you because you are a person of color.” It’s demanded by the plot and by Brontë for the reader to be aware that the young ward’s dubious birth and lack of capital aren’t helped by him being described as “dark-skinned” or “as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” The prejudice he faces becomes the catalyst for the abuse inflicted on him. It’s why he becomes monstrous in character: he has had otherness forced upon him. (...)Wuthering Heights (2026) explores themes of desire, obsession, self-destruction and love—no one will deny that. But even with CharliXCX on the soundtrack, it’s a hollow figurine of the original novel. Brontë’s work has inspired dozens of adaptations and will surely inspire dozens more, but there is a reason why audience members continue to gravitate to that story. Emerald Fennell’s work will not go down in history as worthless; the costuming and overt sexuality will likely delegate it to the realm of camp. But it will not be considered an accurate reflection of the 1847 novel. (Isabe, Papp)
Con este último protagonizó en 1992 una de las adaptaciones más recordadas de 'Cumbres borrascosas', basada en la novela de Emily Brontë. Mucho antes de que la nueva versión protagonizada por Jacob Elordi y Margot Robbie despertara la curiosidad del público, Binoche y Fiennes dieron vida a Catherine Earnshaw y Heathcliff en una película que destacó por la intensidad en las emociones de sus protagonistas y por una química que traspasaba la pantalla. En una época en la que las adaptaciones literarias de gran presupuesto no eran tan habituales como lo son hoy, aquella producción sorprendió por la pasión de sus protagonistas y por una visión especialmente oscura y romántica de la obra. (Álvaro Alonso De La Fuente) (Translation)
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by Alana SanchezISBN-13 : 979-8251483970March 2026The Brontë sisters have long been remembered as literary legends: three gifted women writing in isolation on the Yorkshire moors, surrounded by tragedy and myth. But behind that familiar image were three fiercely intelligent, determined, and ambitious writers who reshaped English literature forever.In this book, they're brought vividly back to life—not as distant icons, but as real women forged by grief, discipline, imagination, and extraordinary creative force. From the harsh realities of Haworth Parsonage to the publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, this biography traces the triumphs, struggles, and heartbreaks that shaped one of literature’s most remarkable families.Rich in atmosphere and grounded in historical detail, this book explores the Brontës’ childhood losses, their secret literary worlds, their fight to publish under male pseudonyms, and the devastating succession of deaths that cut their lives so short. It is a story of resilience, genius, and the unyielding power of women’s voices.For readers who love classic literature, women’s history, and the enduring mystery of the Yorkshire moors, this is a compelling portrait of the sisters whose novels still haunt, challenge, and inspire generations.
